Tackling food inflation will be the top priority of the BJP if voted to power, senior leader and former Union Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha said here on Monday.
Mr. Sinha said the party would be inheriting the “weakest economy” in recent times if it took over the reins of the government, but it had a formula to bring down food inflation.
“Curbing food inflation should be the first step of the new government, and it can be done by releasing huge quantities of foodgrains in our stock. The NDA [National Democratic Alliance] government has done this before in 2002-03, which were years of the worst drought. At the end of the period, inflation was at 3.5 per cent,” he said.
He said the forecast of a weak monsoon had sounded the alarm bells for falling grain production. The BJP, which had been attacking the Congress for weakening the economy, accepted that a turnaround would not be easy.
Giving no time frame to bring about a change, Mr. Sinha said: “I have seen reports about some shortfall [in the monsoon]. Let us see what it is, and what the severity will be in the kharif areas, but the government of the day should take steps that are already there. We know what to do in such a situation,” he said.
He said the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government had left the economy in the “worse crisis” since 1991 and 1998. He alleged that the UPA had been indulging in “tax terrorism.”
“Our party is committed to simplifying the tax system. We have always said that we will critically examine the Direct Tax Code [DTC] and the GST [Goods and Services Tax] Constitution Amendments Bill by getting consensus among States and hastening the process of [introducing the] DTC,” he said.
